Overview

Race as a concept has had a fraught role in the history of Classics, woven into its formation as an academic discipline. While the texts and artefacts of the ancient Mediterranean world provide complex understandings of what race might mean and how it might operate, they have also provided fodder for modern racial ideologies. This Companion offers a wide-ranging and groundbreaking overview of 'race' and 'racism' in ancient Mediterranean cultures as well as in the formation of Classics as a discipline. Through twenty-four chapters written by a team of international scholars, it clarifies the terms and concepts that are central to contemporary theories of race and explores the extent to which they can be applied to the study of the ancient Mediterranean world, in and beyond Greece and Rome. It also showcases various concrete examples of how Classics has been shaped by the intertwined histories of race and colonialism.

Full Product Details

Author:   Rosa Andújar (Barnard College, Columbia University) ,  Elena Giusti (University of Cambridge) ,  Jackie Murray (State University of New York, Buffalo)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
Weight:   1.013kg
ISBN:  

9781009295086

ISBN 10:   100929508
Pages:   564
Publication Date:   21 May 2026
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

An introduction Rosa Andújar, Elena Giusti and Jackie Murray; Part I. Race and the Premodern Era: 1. 'Language and race' Katherine McDonald; 2. 'Race in ancient Greek visual and material culture' Naoíse Mac Sweeney; 3. 'Staging race in Greek drama' Rosa Andújar; 4. 'Plato and Aristotle on race, racecraft and politics' David Kaufman; 5. 'Race, gender, and genocide in Apollonius' Argonautica' Jackie Murray; 6. 'Race and slavery in Roman comedy' Mathias Hanses; 7. 'Sensing brown in the Roman empire' Dan-El Padilla Peralta; 8. 'Ethnographic discourses: Rome's racialized Africa' Elena Giusti; 9. 'Whitish supremacy: thinking with skin in Roman Greece' Tim Whitmarsh; 10. 'Race and religion in late antiquity.' Yonatan Binyam; 11. 'Navigating classics and negotiating indigeneity from Aristotle to the present' Ashley Lance; Part II. Modern Disciplinary Formations: 12. 'Historiography of art' Katherine Harloe; 13. 'Anti-semitism and the foundations of classical scholarship' Simon Goldhill; 14. 'Black Athena/ black Athenians' Maghan Keita; 15. 'Race and historical writing in an age of empire' Phiroze Vasunia; 16. 'Modern scientific race and the classical' Rebecca Futo Kennedy; 17. 'Papyrology and race' Roberta Mazza; 18. 'Bint Al-Nil: on the modern racing of ancient Egypt' Katherine Blouin; 19. 'Translation, privilege and racecraft in classics' Shelley Haley; 20. 'Culture and race in classical reception: west African adaptations of Greek tragedy' Olakunbi Olasope; 21. 'Classical reception in/beyond Asia' Kelly Nguyen; 22. 'Graeco-Roman antiquity and white nationalist conceptions of race' Curtis Dozier; 23. 'Inclusion, diaspora, colonialism: movements in global classics' J. Mira Seo; 24. 'Nation, whiteness, classical antiquity: another fateful triangle' Patrice Rankine; Index.

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Author Information

Rosa Andújar is Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She has published widely on Greek tragedy and its global reception. She is the author of Playing the Chorus in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 2025) and the editor of The Greek Trilogy of Luis Alfaro (Methuen Drama, 2020), which won the 2020 London Hellenic Prize. She has also co-edited Greeks and Romans on the Latin American Stage (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Paths of Song: The Lyric Dimension of Greek Tragedy (De Gruyter, 2018). Elena Giusti is Assistant Professor in Latin at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John's College. She is also the author of Carthage in Virgil's Aeneid: Staging the Enemy under Augustus (Cambridge, 2018) and co-editor of Unspoken Rome: Absence in Latin Literature and its Reception (Cambridge, 2021). She is currently working on a monograph entitled Rome's Imagined Africa (Cambridge, forthcoming). Jackie Murray is Associate Professor of Classics at SUNY University at Buffalo. She has published numerous articles on Hellenistic poetry and race and classics. Her monograph, Apollonius of Rhodes and the Poetics of Controversy is forthcoming with DeGruyter/Brill and her second monograph Becoming the Ibis: Apollonius and Callimachus and dynamics of Allusion and Reception is under contract with Harvard University Press. She is currently working on The Race of Heroes for Yale University Press and Race and Slavery in Plato's Republic, co-authored with David Kaufman for the Cambridge Elements Series.

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